OK, let me get this out of the way right now: Sometimes, I can't help but like George W. Bush.
Yes, he's mean-spirited and shameless and filled with a sense of arrogant entitlement. Yes, he has an adolescent pride in his own ignorance and impatience and provincialism.
But when he teared up last night talking about the families who've lost loved ones in the war, it felt genuine. He's probably a worse actor than Der Gropenator; I doubt he can cry on cue.
His obvious sense of being overwhelmed by the sacrifice these people have made is a feeling I share, just as he obviously shared my sense of frustrated rage in the days after Sept. 11.
But that just means he's a human being with a pulse, and lots of people are -- but lots of people are not qualified to be president of the United States, and this guy sure as hell doesn't deserve to be given another term in that job.
If you need proof, you need look no further than his
speech last night.
Despite posting the worst job-creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover, he proposed nothing bold -- as had been promised -- or even particularly constructive. There was more warmed-over mush here than in a high-school cafeteria: For example, please explain to me how an "opportunity zone" is any different from the Clinton-era "empowerment zones?"
Please explain how your plan to privatize social security is any different from your last plan to do that, the one you proposed in 2000, which died on the vine. Please explain how bold of an idea it is to "lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code?" What does that mean? Will you form a committee or something? What will be the practical effect?
As
Andrew Sullivan and others have noted, he trotted out an awful lot of spending programs, in addition to revenue-draining permanent tax cuts. I understand that Bush thinks his daughters are a
pain in the ass, but does he really have to use out-of-control budget deficits to punish the rest of us, and our children, and our children's children, for the sins of Jenna and Barbara?
To be fair, Kerry has proposed a lot of spending and tax cuts, too, but at the very least he's not promising regressive tax shelters, and he'd raise the top tax rate, and he's expressed a willingness to curb his own plans and instill a little spending discipline, if necessary, to keep the deficit under control. Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton did the same thing. This Bush has shown no such discipline. He's never met a pork spending bill he didn't like.
His heart wasn't really in all this economic stuff anyway. After all, fretting about the economy is for girlie men.
To try to coax the soccer moms back out from under the couch, where Zell Miller had chased them, he had no choice but to trot out such ancient chestnuts as "flex time" and "the soft bigotry of low expectations," but he was really chomping at the bit to get to the bloody, red meat of his speech: what passes for "foreign policy" in the Bush administration.
And there, this bold, forward-looking, transformational president offered ... more warmed-over mush.
Special delivery ... of freedom!
In fact, it's warmed-over, discredited, neo-con mush: we'll be delivering freedom and Democracy to the world, it turns out, whether the world wants freedom or not, because -- of course -- God wants us to:
I believe all these things because freedom is not America's gift to the world, it is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world.
And America is sort of like God's UPS man, delivering big packages of freedom to the world's doorstep.
The only problem with that is, the last place we delivered freedom to is still trying to kill us. With 140,000 of our troops bogged down there, how are we going to deliver freedom to other countries? Stern words? Brain waves?
And let's assume that, somehow, Jeffersonian Democracy does suddenly spring to life in Iraq. Is that going to infect the rest of the Middle East with Democracy Fever? I don't know. Let's take a look at the countries that neighbor another Middle Eastern democracy, Turkey:
Hmm... let's see: Syria, Iran and ... Iraq! Yep, looks like this spreading-democracy thing has a long track record of success.
Where's Poppy?
By the way, the future Mrs. Capt. Willard noticed last night the short shrift Poppy got in the speech. If you happened to be snuffling back tears of patriotic joy at the moment he was mentioned, you might have missed it:
I'm blessed with a sister and brothers who are my closest friends. And I will always be the proud and grateful son of George and Barbara Bush.
My father served eight years at the side of another great American, Ronald Reagan. His spirit of optimism and good will and decency are in this hall and are in our hearts, and will always define our party.
Yep, that's what Poppy contributed to the world: he spawned Dubya and "served" "at the side" of Reagan like a faithful sidekick.
Of course, on second thought, it makes sense for Bush to ignore the fact that his father was also a president, however briefly. After all, we're talking about a guy who flip-flopped, raised taxes and left Saddam Hussein in power. At RNC 2004, that's Kerry-like, treasonous behavior. They probably had to put a Hannibal Lecter mask on Zell Miller any time he got around Poppy, given that track record.
Warning: Iraq re-hashing
Speaking of crazy people, I do have to give Bush credit for wading into the quagmire of Iraq, a fairly taboo subject for much of the rest of the convention:
In Saddam Hussein, we saw a threat. Members of both political parties, including my opponent and his running mate, saw the threat, and voted to authorize the use of force. We went to the United Nations Security Council, which passed a unanimous resolution demanding the dictator disarm, or face serious consequences. Leaders in the Middle East urged him to comply. After more than a decade of diplomacy, we gave Saddam Hussein another chance, a final chance, to meet his responsibilities to the civilized world. He again refused, and I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office, a decision no president would ask for, but must be prepared to make. Do I forget the lessons of Sept. 11 and take the word of a madman, or do I take action to defend our country? Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time.
I have to say, this is about as reasonable an explanation as anybody could possibly give for going into Iraq. I didn't think it was necessary at the time, and a lot of other people didn't think it was necessary, either, but I wasn't entirely sure about my opinion.
But there's also little doubt that members of this administration wanted to go into Iraq for months -- in some cases, years -- before Sept. 11, and that the tragedy gave them their excuse. And the administration's credibility about claims that Saddam had WMD was eroded by their relentless effort to misleadingly tie Saddam to al Qaeda and 9/11, in the absence of any evidence.
I doubt very seriously that the decision to go into Iraq was nearly as agonizing as it's described here, not only because of their obvious desire to do so, but also because they obviously believed the war would be a cake walk.
But they were wrong about that, as they were wrong about Saddam's weapons program and about Saddam's involvement with al Qaeda.
What's more, they were willfully, aggressively wrong about how to run "post-war" Iraq, and we and the Iraqis are paying for it with lives, limbs and treasure. Perhaps worse than this, the chaos in Iraq, including our disgraceful treatment of prisoners, has ruined our reputation and inspired a new generation of terrorists.
For how much of this is George W. Bush responsible? It's tough to say, but a guy who claimed he would be a "CEO president" needs to be treated like a CEO: he needs to be fired.
Update: Saletan reacts with a little more relish:
Recession. Unemployment. Corporate fraud. A war based on false premises that has cost us $200 billion and nearly a thousand American lives. They're all hills we've "been given to climb." It's as though Bush wasn't president. As though he didn't get the tax cuts he wanted. As though he didn't bring about postwar Iraq and authorize the planning for it. All this was "given," and now Bush can show up, three and a half years into his term, and start solving the problems some other president left behind.
Saletan's been knocking them out of the park lately.
